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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24793747">Whistle While You Work</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkrealmist/pseuds/Darkrealmist'>Darkrealmist</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action/Adventure, Angels, Card Games, Dark Comedy, Family Drama, Fantasy, Gen, Ghosts, Gothic, Horror, In-Jokes, Innistrad (Magic: The Gathering), Letters, Lovecraftian, Mad Science, Magic, Murder, Sibling Rivalry, Vampires, Violence, War, Werewolves, Wizards, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Wordcount: Over 1.000, Wordcount: Under 10.000, Zombies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:42:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,103</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24793747</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkrealmist/pseuds/Darkrealmist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gisa Cecani redeclares war on her brother Geralf in the most audacious, most disrespectful way possible.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Geralf Cecani &amp; Gisa Cecani, No Romantic Relationship(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Whistle While You Work</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Whistle While You Work</p><p>Author’s Note: Enjoy the story and R&amp;R.</p><p>Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of <em>Magic: The Gathering</em>.</p><p>Summary:</p><p>Gisa Cecani redeclares war on her brother Geralf in the most audacious, most disrespectful way possible.</p>
<hr/><p>Gisa the Mad. Gisa the Insane. Grimgrin.</p><p>The nicknames Geralf spewed at his sister weren’t original. Hell, two of these Commander Odric and his cathar wussies disgorged during her capture and imprisonment in Rider’s Lock!</p><p>She wondered if Mummy survived the tentacle monsters with at least three of her limbs. Her bidding was Gretchen do whatever Geralf asked except leave, loyal reminder of his inability to do anything on his own. A memento mori <em>he was a child</em>.</p><p>He always took Mummy’s side of the argument. No shocker he showed an early interest in alchemy, stitching together stupid skaabs in Mummy’s laboratory from spare body parts between (and in many cases, derived from) their parents’ damn boring parties.</p><p>Ghoulcalling would be evermore regarded the classic approach to necromancy, as Father asseverated.</p><p>Squishy Quilter should have stuck to the harpsichord!</p><p>For a period, they’d begrudged a – she shuddered – <em>truce</em>. Put aside their sibling spat, shovelling and pitchforking the fiends only slightly less tolerable than Geralf that’d infiltrated Innistrad. But that was yesterday for Gisa. She’d sold her territory in the Moorland. Cecani Manor was compromised, crashed by Order of Saint Trafters who reorganized under Sigarda’s aid after Avacyn went wacko and purged a few too many fishermen.</p><p>Their games couldn’t go on sabbatical just yet. She was having too much fun!</p><p>Geralf dragged his viscera-soaked rubber boots up to Gisa’s woodland cemetery haunt. Grafstones carrying the symbol of the Church of Avacyn had been turned over, the targets of graverobbers and faithless looters in recent nights past. A small shamble of ghouls escorted Gisa: rangers with splintered bone missing the hefts of femurs and entire forearms, and torn-mouthed farmers still bloody from the last time they were raised.</p><p>Between becoming a geist, a vampire, or unhallowed, the Blessed Sleep really was more of a nap.</p><p>“Once in the box, we’re all the same,” she used to joke. Treatment the lunarch Mikaeus, their scandalous cousin, did not even escape.</p><p>Rubbing formaldehyde on the wound, Gisa whistled an infernal ditty. Orchard-variety mages employed fancy gestures casting their spells. She chanted and sang the undead out of their graves without theatrical accompaniment.</p><p>If you were one of those provincial idiots calling her bad dancing “theatre,” Geralf had a <em>viscus vitae</em> jar mixed from lamp oil and dried angel blood prepared for immediate, spastic injection. Failing that, a nice ice pick his apprentice Oglor selected, hammered behind the eye socket.</p><p>This dearth of visual <em>pop</em> further applied to Gisa’s zombies, behaved bar initial reawakening or when the Cecanis were fighting to determine whose siegecraft was cleverer.</p><p>“I see you found new maggot bags.”</p><p>“Soft dirt makes for light work, you toddler.”</p><p>“Oh, do get on with it! Why am I out here? You have some nerve, exhuming Father again to bring me here!”</p><p>Gisa’s rictus widened. Who was she to break up the family? “I’m officially reinstating <em>The Five Laws of NecroWarfare</em>!”</p><p>“Not that awful nonsense again, sister! You’re a veritable pain in my brain! Plus, you cheat! Do you know you pulled me away at a pivotal moment? Ludevic of Ulm was demonstrating his latest prototype, an amalgam combining a werewolf and geistcatcher’s rig! He saw it in a dream! Can such genius be taught?”</p><p>“Burying yourself beneath a merchant’s toys? Are you still wailing your girlfriend dropped you like a sack of feet?”</p><p>“I told you! Lili is not my girlfriend! She’s a witch, and so are you!”</p><p>“A compliment? Dear brother, I am moved!”</p><p>“It’s not your magic I’m commenting on!” He banged his enraged surgeon’s hands up and down. “Accusations of witchcraft are not a compliment!”</p><p>“So true. Witches get persecuted and burned at the stake, and I’m FREE! It must crush that tiny, hubristic mind of yours, being twisted around a girl’s finger, especially a necromancer your sister’s age! The <em>better</em> necromancy, might I add!”</p><p>With the amount of bile lumping, he could be mistaken for having a second liver like the extraneous organs he discussed introducing into his goliaths with Ludevic.</p><p>“Nooooo, Cable Knit Jerky’s angry! Mothers, cloister your daughters!”</p><p>“What about <em>your</em> best friend? ‘Good with rocks’ Nahiri?” The skaberen dusted his gory smock derisively.</p><p>The mention of the Lithomancer soured her mood. Although Gisa and Geralf violently denied it affected them, they’d both received slaps in the face to their dignity as a consequence of sudden unexplained arrivals and departures.</p><p>“Feculent bastard!”</p><p>“Moron! If all you want to do is chitter, I’m leaving! I’m due back at Ludevic’s laboratory! We are collaborating on a fresh masterpiece! Fresh as can be expected of a skaab! You’ve heard of Kraum, Savage of Selhoff? For a decade, Ludevic idealized his opus! Melding our talents, and consulting the alchemical texts he loaned me on advanced wing cobbling, we may finally replicate the experiment that gave life to Kraum’s galvanic membranes!”</p><p>“Very intriguing…NOT! Doesn’t it eat at your decayed soul like worm tails, the slow grind? Sewing a single ruinator takes three trips to a diregraf. My lovelies, they rise ready to serve. Ready to battle your ‘elite troops’ any day!”</p><p>“I’m not changing my position. The only rats eating at me are your legless soldiers’ unsporting bites when you realize how brilliant my skaabs are!”</p><p>“That’s disappointing. Because the first bone has already been flung.”</p><p>Whistling, she heartlessly summoned Father’s brittle cadaver.</p><p>“I’m standing right in front of you! You don’t have to send a messenger to hand me a letter!”</p><p>Still, he opened it.</p>
<hr/><p>Geralf,</p><p>I entombed him while you were out. How’s <em>this</em> for motivation, Sausage Tailor?</p><p>– Gisa</p>
<hr/><p>“Who is him?”</p><p>Another ripened ghoul entered the silver moonlight as he was reading.</p><p>Egad! Ludevic! His <em>mentor</em>! The most famous necro-alchemist next to himself and the pioneer of live brain extractions, Delia Davison!</p><p>Clues disclosing Ludevic’s struggle with Gisa warranted investigation. Blue and red cables braided through his stomach, transplanted there from a tragic slip upon the creature they constructed, and a ghastly gash marked where Gisa severed Ludevic’s spinal column.</p><p>“For an old fart who says he’s aiming to understand the horror his creations inspire, Ludevic didn’t have an open mind about firsthand experience before I cracked open his skull! I had to go to parish on his wheezing neck with my shovel!”</p><p>Geralf crumpled the letter spitefully. She’d signed in Ludevic’s blood.</p><p>“Well? This time tomorrow, Meat Embroiderer?”</p>
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